[Ti] Shawn the King

[Chris Olson]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 8:54 PM, Jesse Brown wrote:

> Chris is a worthy opponent but no staying power apparently. Can't have 
> a decent flame war if your feelings get hurt too easily.

I have little desire to fight some pointless small time "flame war" on 
an internet mailing list.  I got more class than that.  I present my 
thoughts on this "transition" as I see them.  The self-righteous 
zealots see fit to perceive anything negative about Apple Computer as 
some sort of personal attack, or excuse to start one.

All I said was that I was given 64-bit Power in 2003 with Jobs being 
quoted as recent as 2004 that Apple sees no advantages to switching to 
Intel because the PowerPC platform will provide plenty of scalability 
for Apple for the future.  They publish white papers and get developers 
and users onboard:
http://images.apple.com/powermac/pdf/PowerPCG5_WP_06092004.pdf

A year later the story changes with a complete about-face.  Excuses 
about IBM not being able to deliver a 3.0 GHz G5 when the G5 in the 
Power world is old news.  It's a scaled down Power4 and GHz is not what 
gets the work done.  Meanwhile IBM has the Power5+ - a 90nm multi-core 
cpu that has memory bandwidth over 800 GB/second.  There's nothing that 
comes close to it.  And the Power6 - a 65 nm multi-core cpu with 
virtual core partitions that makes the Power5+ look like a toy, due to 
be released in November of this year.

My whole point has been, and I believe I've presented it without any 
personal attacks, that this "transition" is not going to work for 
everybody.

I stated it in another post, but this is not about Apple building the 
best computers for their customers, because if it was they'd be 
covering all the bases.  If they were really interested in building the 
best computers for their customers they wouldn't be throwing all their 
eggs in the Intel basket and they'd license that Power6 technology from 
IBM - use the 970FX as a stepping stone.  I don't care if a PowerMac G6 
costs $7,000.  It'll be worth it because it can do what no Intel 
machine can do running the software that some of us have developed and 
purchased for 64-bit Mac OS X on PowerPC.  They're not doing it, so 
they're going to loose some customers.  We'll port to 64-bit PowerPC 
linux which is every bit as robust and scalable as Mac OS X, and we'll 
run it on IBM BladeCenter JS20's.  I really didn't want to leave Mac OS 
X because it's a great operating system.

I was told offlist to not let the cpu hit me in the ass on the way out. 
  That certainly sounds like a formula for success for Apple Computer, 
wouldn't you say?
--
Chris